A Cowbird Walks out of a Bar…

For close to five years I have been a member of an online community of writers called for no compelling reason cowbird.com, which grew to encompass 14,000+ writers who put out almost 90,000 stories, all tagged and organized, most with images, some with audio. Members could love and comment on stories and privately message one another. It was a happening place for authors and visual artists

Yesterday, Cowbird turned to stone. The writers and the stories will remain, but authors and readers can no longer interact and no new stories can be posted. Instead of being a living “library of human experience” it’s become the library’s archives.

The founder of Cowbird, Jonathan Harris, ran it as a nonprofit company. It hosted no ads and was free to all, but many writers chose to pay a yearly fee to become “Cowbird Citizens.” Jonathan pulled the plug because he felt people are interacting online more than is healthy for them and wanted to encourage his users to get out into the real world more often. But it was also true that interest in the site was waning, both among its users and for Jonathan himself. See for yourself in his farewell story, embedded below.

For me, it seemed the right thing to do at the right time. But many core Cowbird citizens didn’t want to drift away from one another and so are in the process of setting up new shops at several other venues, notably mewe.com (invitational) and medium.com (open). Although I’m involved in that, closing the barn door gave me the impetus I needed to open this site after hemming and hawing about it for half a year.

My mixed emotions tell me Jonathan hasn’t taken anything away I couldn’t let go of. And so, after posting 362 stories at Cowbird (a few of which are showing up over here), I’m ready to move on. Thanks, Jonathan, for all the fish.

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Author: admin

I'm an ex-this-and-that, including software developer, computer graphics researcher, geospatial analyst, market manager, and technical writer, who now writes full-time when not reading, running a household, foraging for edible mushrooms, pushing progressive politics, or volunteering fsomewhere. I live near Boston with my wife, daughter, two cats and two old cars.
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The Daily (or whenever) Eruption

DIY Sex Ed: Wednesday 5/22/19

As a callow, overweight youth just having graduated from Tween University with a degree in Acne, I felt certain stirrings and had heard certain rumors about “doing it.” One day I repeated a crude joke from the playground to my mom and followed up with:

“What’s a cunt?”

“Well,” she said, drawing a breath and letting it out, “it’s part of the female anatomy and I’ll leave it at that. I think you and your father should have a little talk about the birds and the bees.”

Assuming she had prepped Dad to have “the talk,” I waited for it to happen, face flushing whenever we menfolk were by ourselves, but he never did tell me anything about reproductive rites. But it wasn’t long before a little book that I didn’t think had been in our library mysteriously appeared on my bedspread, called Facts of Life and Love for Teenagers by a nice lady whose name I forget.

So I did what any 13-year-old would do: I immediately hid the book, lest a friend come by and notice it, and furtively read it in bed by flashlight, looking for the good parts. There was, alas, no mention of birds or bees. It occurred to me that I had never witnessed birds doing it, and certainly not bees, but perhaps those two houseflies I remembered seeing united in flight were making whoopee. It must be a thing, I figured, recalling listening to Noel Coward croon “Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it” from our phonograph, but really, how do birds do it? Do they take off their feathers first? Do Bees lay aside their little stingers?